CBS News’ “60 Minutes” targeted California’s high-speed rail project on Sunday, speaking to multiple officials about the project that has yielded little return since state residents voted in support of it in 2008. [some emphasis, links added]
CBS’ Jon Wertheim spoke to Rep. Vince Fong, R-Calif., Lou Thompson, who helped found Amtrak and served on California’s high-speed rail peer-review group until 2024, California High Speed Rail Authority board member Anthony Williams, and California Secretary of Transportation Toks Omishakin.
“We’re now in 2026. There are no trains. There’s no track laid. It was a complete bait and switch,” Fong told “60 Minutes.”
California voters approved nearly $10 billion in taxpayer funds via municipal bonds in 2008 for an 800-mile high-speed rail system connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles, which was estimated to cost roughly $33 billion.
The project, which began under former Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, has been plagued by ballooning costs and delays, and Williams said the latest estimate of the cost to connect the two cities was over $125 billion, nearly quadruple the original amount.
[That’s “more funding than Amtrak has received in its history, and still leaves a shortfall of roughly $90 billion.”]
The California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) said it expects trains to begin running in 2030, a decade after the Golden State’s initial goal.
CBS reported that the state was getting ready to lay down track for the project, but instead of Los Angeles to San Francisco, it will run about a third of that distance, connecting Bakersfield and Merced.
Omishakin acknowledged that mistakes were made in the project.
“There were mistakes made. Some of the criticism on this project, I think, is very fair,” he said. “I don’t think the voters fully understood — and neither did we in the public sector — what it was going to take to actually get this project delivered.”
Williams told CBS that the financing was not there to complete the rail when construction started.
“It wasn’t. Let’s be real. We had a lot to learn, we had a lot of growth to do, and, you know, it’s arguable whether we should have been clearer about that,” he said.
Thompson was asked by CBS’s Wertheim if he thought he’d see the system built in their lifetimes.
“I don’t know. I’m dubious. I’m dubious. Absent a national political will to work with the states to create some of these systems, I think it’s going to be in, of course, in my lifetime, almost certainly not. But maybe yours, I don’t know,” he said.
California’s high-speed rail project suffered a major setback after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy announced the termination of $4 billion in unspent federal funding by the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) in July 2025.
Citing 16 years of failure, no completed high-speed track, and escalating costs, Duffy declared the project at the time, dubbed the “train to nowhere,” a mismanaged and over-budget “boondoggle.”
Top: Gavin Newsom announces the completion of the southern railhead facility for the bullet train to nowhere. Image via KBAX/YouTube screencap.
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